In an article on Google website Julia Rozovsky, a People Operations, Analytics and HR Strategy Leader at Google wrote (circa 2015) about the 5 keys to a successful team at Google. They set out to examine what makes Google team effective. This research was conducted over two years, 200 interviews, 250 attributes and 180+ google teams. I share this statistics to assure that the outcome has some solid basis.
Over the past several weeks we have been running the Selling Pains Survey amongst sales professionals and this is what we figured :
If you Google time management you will get a million results. Apparently a lot of people are searching for a way to manage time and a lot are writing about it. A lot revolves around a To Do list and thus ways of managing those. Some others talk of managing your energy and not time. Jeremiah Dillon, now head of Insights and Strategy at Google Cloud Marketing had a take that is easy to understand and apply. Think of yourself as a Maker and not a manager. According to him Managers typically divide their days in to 30 min chunks while the maker designs his work in half or full day chunks. Working without disruption is one of the most referred method for productive output. Deep Work by Cal Newport, the seminal book on working in a highly distracting world shows that shutting off the noise for prolonged period helps you think and do. The key in all this is an uninterrupted block of time that helps thoughts flow.
Last December Openview Partners put out their predictions of SAAS trends they believed will become mainstream in 2019. 4 months into the year I wanted to revisit those and list them out so you can see (and share) how they are playing out for you and in market segments you are watching. Openview is very focused on ‘Product Led’ strategies, and well, products. Their portfolio is evidence to that approach – with products like Calendly, Expensify and Loopio. So no wonder the list started with –
A few weeks back David Cummings wrote about The Double Sale. A sales rep he was speaking with about selling the different softwares he has been selling through his career quipped about his latest job: “now, I don’t have to make the double sale”.
As one looks at folksy quotes from Warren Buffet it was interesting to see what has been the reaction to the 2019 Berkshire Hathaway Annual General meeting at the CHI center at Omaha Nebraska where as tradition goes Warren Buffet(88) and Charles Munger (94) answered shareholder questions for 6 hours (link to entire proceedings courtesy Yahoo Finance, below). I am not a stock market buff and I went looking for native wisdom that might have been shared by the two legends. Here is what I found as I read around.
Sharon Drew Morgen is a contrarian voice in the sales universe. She was perhaps among the first to point out that the sales process which has not changed (while everything around business has ) over the past 100 years need some relooking. Why should a 5% close rate be acceptable for companies?
Undoubtedly our life is a sum total of the decisions we make. In the exact same place with exact same inputs two human beings make two completely different decisions. One turns out to be more right than the other. Charlie Munger, part of the Buffet Munger duo, extolled the power of identifying and applying mental models across disciplines in his 1995 speech, ‘The Psychology of Human Misjudgement’.
Bessemer Venture Partners released their State of the Cloud 2019 report at Saastr 2019 and it was a lot of good news. While a decade ago there were no private Cloud Unicorns, there are 55 today. Add the 44 that are public, there are in total 99 Unicorns in the Cloud ecosystem.
David Cummings on Startups is one of the most readable columns and I love his insights. In a recent post he writes about the need to challenge inertia. In other words this resonates with disruption. Sometimes status quo becomes the norm and there are lores of how Kodak sat on the Digital photography technology for over 3 decades because they believed that they were in the chemicals industry and not of memories. Sometimes entire industries are in denial – like, you guessed it – the music industry – which fought back Napster. A lot of it is still visible in the book industry that still doesn’t allow or have figured a way to allow the owner of a copy of a Digital book to be shared or loaned. The traditional license model of softwares, remember? I wonder what they are thinking about these days? Oh wait they have actually moved to a more sustainable Cloud/SaaS model where they cannot force customers to upgrade. Remember the backlash on Apple when users figured they are deliberately slowing down the phones through updates in OS? The same old Microsoft / Intel combination all over again.
